Computer users today are able to access vast amounts of information through various local and wide area computer networks. Through proprietary networks and the Internet, a user may access information from computer servers located in the same city, in a different state, or in a different country. One popular tool used for accessing and viewing information hosted on a network server is a web browser (e.g., Microsoft's Internet Explorer™ or Mozilla's Firefox™). A web browser is typically installed on a user's computing device and it allows the user to access information associated with a particular uniform resource locator (URL) at a network server. Modern web browsers feature intuitive graphical user interfaces that allow individuals without technical expertise to easily navigate from one website or webpage to another in pursuit of information the user desires.
While modern web browsing software has revolutionized the way individuals approach information retrieval over a network, such as the Internet, there are unfortunately many limitations associated with this software. Among these limitations is the relative inability of a user to contribute meaningful personal content to contacts and associates over the Internet without such functionality being built by any particular website itself. Conventional attempts to handle this issue have included making various information sharing technologies available, such as web logging, commonly enabled in the form of blogging sites (e.g., www.blogger.com), wiki sites that allow user collaboration (e.g., Wikipedia™), and social network sites (e.g., sites linked with applications whereby users view the profiles created by other users in standardized templates, and visibility is designated by some characteristic sets of “social rules”). Each of these platforms allows a user limited capability to share his or her views with others having access to the same network or web sites. These technologies share several important drawbacks, among which are that a user's views and/or accessible content are limited to a single website's data content. In these scenarios, a user's ideas are effectively walled off from content residing on other websites. When a user wishes to comment (e.g., with textual, audio, graphical, and/or video input) on content residing on a particular webpage data across multiple web-venues, to share personal content with his or her contacts and associates, these other forms of communication are of little use if contextual addition is part of the message. Typically, a user is forced to write his or her thoughts down in an email and then send them directly to another user. A composed email may include a hypertext link in the body of his email. This method of sharing comments is unwieldy. It limits the utility of the user's comments because the comments are not visibly positioned next to the web content of interest, and decouple context from the content, which may alter the message of the content.